Persistent issues possibly with httpd.conf and/or .htaccess

Hi all,
I've been trying to install SS for a while now. Tried v2.2.3, v.2.3.0-rc2, and just recently 2.0.DailyBuild.2009-01-15.
I'm installing on my own freebsd server. All the checks on the first installation page are OK (php, mysql, apache, mod_rewrite, etc).

* mod_rewrite is enabled in your httpd.conf
* AllowOverride is enabled for the current path.

Please check these options, then refresh this page.If you believe that your configuration is correct, click here to proceed anyway.

Of course the obvious question is have I checked that mod_rewrite is enabled and AllowOverride All is there for my current path? And they are! When I tried to install v2.3.0-rc2, I seemed to get a little farther, however it failed with a message saying that friendly URLs were not working. I couldn't find useful help on this.

I have a pretty general question that maybe one of the developers of install.php (or rewritetest.php) can help with. There are a bunch of places where mod_rewrite is tested and they all revolve around defining a $location (some URL which doesn't exist, as far as I can see) and then they check for the contents of that file using file_get_contents. This is usually the test that fails and leads to the halt in my attempted install.

The strange this is that I can't find any code anywhere that would write the file defined in $location. Surely something must write it first before its contents can be checked.

I'm no expert in php,javascript,ajax etc. Any advice here would be an education for me and might help me to weed out this problem for myself.

Let me repeat what most seem to say: SilverStripe looks great and I'd really love to get it working.

Ok,
So I think I understand what might be happening. I'm teaching myself, so bear with me here:
The $location set to InstallerTest/testrewrite is actually a call to a sapphire function in sapphire/dev/InstallerTest.php which should echo the string 'OK'. This doesn't seem to work, and I think this might be related to the report above that friendly URLs are not working, i.e., setting the $location to http://my.ss.site/InstallerTest/testrewrite should (if it doesn't exist as a file or directory) be translated as something like http://my.ss.site/sapphire/main.php?url=InstallerTest&testrewrite (maybe).
I'll try explicitly entering this in my browser and see what I can do.
If you think you can help me with this, please chime in.
davegp

OK, I think we've got to the bottom of this one.
Having consulted with my webadmin, it looks like I was screwing up something with Apache.
I was editing httpd.conf, but my site is actually a virtual host and I should have left httpd.conf alone and concentrated on changing extras/httpd-vhosts.conf. I can post relevant details of that here:

#
# Virtual Hosts
#
# If you want to maintain multiple domains/hostnames on your
# machine you can setup VirtualHost containers for them. Most configurations
# use only name-based virtual hosts so the server doesn't need to worry about
# IP addresses. This is indicated by the asterisks in the directives below.
#
# Please see the documentation at
# <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/&gt;
# for further details before you try to setup virtual hosts.
#
# You may use the command line option '-S' to verify your virtual host
# configuration.

#
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#
NameVirtualHost *:80

#
# VirtualHost example:
# Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container.
# The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not
# match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block.
#
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin someone@somewhere.som
ServerName my.site.som
ServerAlias site